New York

False Flag
25-20 43rd Ave
Long Island City
April 15–May 15, 2017

The story opens with a mole. A big one. Untitled (mole) (all works 2017) lies with its butt greeting you at the door. The mammal is accompanied by an untitled print of an oversize ant, the image taken from an M. C. Escher illustration. Escher once asked, “Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling?”

The Dutch artist might have ignored the fundamentals of gravity, but Andrew Ross takes them head on, laying out a narrative where gravity is a character as real as the mole or ant. Ross’s exhibition—with its creatures, exotic garden, and reclining man admiring an apple—distorts what could otherwise be seen as a kind of pastoral. Using the language of display (plinths, pedestals, trusses), Ross teases out the purgatory between what we experience and what we know: the heavens, the earth, and the scaffolding that connects them. The many faces of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson found in Ross’s flowers (Untitled [landowner]) hammer this point home.

One suspects Tyson would admire the way that Ross’s universe, situated in the double helix of fact and fiction, gives body to the forces we usually take for granted. His Untitled (Figure), a nod to the Newtonian myth, locates us in a moment of wonder when daydreams collide with reality. The ceiling and floor collapse and leave us with a divine sense of self-awareness. In the words of Tyson: “We are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us.”